


And Before Us Only the Sun

by TheBitterKitten



Series: Celestial Bodies [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dark Will Graham, M/M, Murder Husbands, Post-Season/Series 03, just coffee, out of your depth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25463071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBitterKitten/pseuds/TheBitterKitten
Summary: “It’s only coffee, Jack.”
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Series: Celestial Bodies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1850647
Comments: 7
Kudos: 153





	And Before Us Only the Sun

It takes more effort to really look at Will than it did to look into Bella’s casket the first time. Jack steels himself, his face stone, and then steels himself again, hand gripping the seat back of his chair.

“It’s only coffee, Jack,” drawls Will, seated next to Hannibal.

“Please, have a seat,” offers Hannibal, gesturing demurely to the chair Jack is already holding onto.

He swallows. There is something so incredibly subconsciously wrong about the two of them that he’s having a hard time getting a good breath in. His hair prickles and some animal instinct starts screaming down his spine that he will die here, that he should grab hold of his gun and flee. He sits, unbuttoning his jacket and smoothing his tie.

“Will. Hannibal. After all this time,” he says, words falling heavy in the sunlight. He manages to look them both in the eye before that animal part recoils from the blood-wet gazes meeting his own. He clears his throat, feeling almost dizzy.

Will and Hannibal sit in perfect ease, shoulders turned almost unnoticeably towards each other. Hannibal wears a positively cheerful tan suit with a calm blue waistcoat, gray-green paisley tie and pocket kerchief. He looks almost the same as he did over his dinner tables in Baltimore, if the crows-feet lines around his eyes are more pronounced. Almost. There’s something fundamental about Hannibal that is different, that Jack can’t quite place. But it’s Will who looks most changed. The last time Jack saw him through a camera lens, Will had been shadowed, a bubbling erratic energy twitching through his hands as he climbed into the van to sit across from a shackled and masked Hannibal. Before that, he had been pure empathic chaos, scrabbling to find purchase on the side of the angels. Now, he wears a navy suit with such a sheen it hints at crow’s feathers, no tie, a long scar marring his cheek and matching the one on his forehead just visible beneath a curl. He's still as the dead, not even the crossed foot pointed towards Hannibal bobbing. But more than the placidity of his form, it’s his eyes—molten, sanguinary blue, holding his gaze steadily. Jack looks down, glance skittering away over the table, feeling something chip off his heart.

“So why now, Jack?”Will is speaking now. It’s smooth, amiably caustic as he’s ever been. As he does, Hannibal’s gaze flickers over the other man’s lips, a visual caress. They are so incredibly incongruous with the sunlight streaming onto the café tucked into a corner of the piazza. It isn’t their looks; to anyone else, they’re a charming, distinguished model couple having coffee with an old friend. But what Jack is feeling—what is setting off all the animal alarm bells in his mind— is the perfectly malicious serenity shimmering off of them in waves, almost a palpable entity of itself; the feeling that they are talking and he can’t hear them; the feeling that he is surrounded and the snare is closing around him the longer he sits there, even as the pairs sips coffee in front of him. The scar on his neck where Hannibal stabbed him begins to throb. He lifts his cup and sips, brow furrowing at the thick bitterness of the espresso. He sets it down.

“I’m here to make a deal for Alana Bloom,” he says carefully, and the look on Will’s face makes his stomach drop— disgust, disappointment, fading interest. Hannibal retains his neutrally pleased expression.

“I’m afraid Alana Bloom has been dead since you locked yourself in my pantry, Jack,” Hannibal says affably, “and even if I had not promised her, she visited very many indignities upon me since which are unforgivable.”

Jack presses forward. “Freddie Lounds,” He offers, hoping to see the interest rekindled in that viciously calm new gaze of Will’s.

“You think she isn’t dead already?” is the reply from Will, the end caught in a snarling laugh, the scarred side of his face pulled back in a smirk.

“I know she isn’t dead already, because she’s been in FBI custody since before you two went over that cliff.” Jack resettles, grasping for a foothold in the tide of the waves lapping at his feet.

“Her body may go on breathing, but she is dead, Jack. You’re trading corpses, here,” Will says, before he mercifully closes his eyes and tips his head back to soak in the sun, giving Jack a reprieve from his eyes. Hannibal’s gaze tracks slowly down the curve of Will’s throat, and Jack is taken aback at the naked intimacy, even more than the little smile that plays on Will’s lips in clear response.He refocuses.

“Then what would you trade? Free travel through the US? Your dogs, Will? Jimmy Price still has Winston. He adopted as many as he could from Molly before she left.” Jack hasn’t stopped looking at Will, searching for anything he recognizes. At Winston’s name, Will’s head perks up, and a softness shades his face.

“Is he happy?”

“He’s drinking again.”

“Winston. Is he happy?”

“Jimmy takes good care of him.”

At that, Will smiles fondly. “Good.”

“So is that an avenue you’d trade in?” Jack presses, hoping for an inlet.

“No. He’s happy.” Jack realises that the fondness on Will’s face is the type one gets from looking at an old photograph. It’s the past.

“Alana was kind and good to you, Will,” Jack tries again, ignoring Hannibal, “Are you really going to let her die, after she saved your life?”

That sickeningly calm gaze is back on Jack, and he represses a shudder. But it’s Hannibal who speaks.

“Tell me, Jack, are you fighting so hard for Alana because you have thrown Miriam Lass away, you have thrown dear Will away, and now your guilt eats at you from the empty side of your bed?”

Jack snarls instinctively, into Hannibal’s smiling face, but he calms himself. As Will has grieved Winston and his pack, Jack has grieved Bella.

“No, because she deserves to live and your note sent to her son’s school will start a war, even if it was just a congratulations for finishing the year. We’ve let you be considered dead, for Will’s sake, hoping somehow he was still playing a long, long line with you, Hannibal. But if you go after her, we will bring you down,” he says slowly, putting weight into the words.

“For my sake?” From Will, a questioning note in his voice.

“Yes, Will, for your sake. No one thought you would go willingly if you weren’t dead. Not after he framed you, gutted you, and murdered Abigail Hobbs right in front of you. Not after how he humiliated Beverly.” He’s fighting dirty now, ripping at his own wounds in the process.

Hannibal’s face is a void, and Will leans forward. And Jack has to look at what was his friend again, see the man who is not Will and yet entirely Will shift again. There is something entirely Other about him now, something that Jack has only seen in Hannibal vaulting over his counter in attack, and fear shrieks along Jack’s nerves, making his mouth go dry and his body leaden.

Whatever malice was in repose is now directed at Jack, and Will’s voice has an edge that Jack will gladly go his entire life to never hear again.

“Not once has anything you’ve done ever been for my sake, Jack. If you had believed me, if any of you hadn’t abandoned me, she would be alive. You promised you would help me as you held my head open to nightmares, and you left me alone. I begged you for mercy, and you guilted me into trailing along after you. I’m just lucky, I guess, that the therapist you chose to rubberstamp my file gave me a paddle. You’re only distressed now to see that I have found my way to the light, and without you to hold the leash.”

Jack takes a long time to answer. He doesn’t look at Will. “Is... the light... becoming what Hannibal is? Handing your leash over to him? Will, you looked in order to stop people like him,” Jack begins, and then the penny drops- “like yourself.”

It’s Hannibal’s turn to lean in now, pinpoint light caught in his eyes making them seem fathomless, alien, Other.

“If I hold Will’s leash, he holds mine. Or perhaps we have no leashes to hold any longer. Do not deny dear Will his self-possession, Jack. It’s very rude.” The little smile and tilt of his head are as light as they are warning.

“I am what I have always been, Jack. It just took you pushing and pushing me to see it. I looked for you. One after another, after another, after another, so many it set my brain on fire, and how many lives did we save, Jack? How many had already stopped? You saw what was happening to me, Jack, and you pushed harder.How much was just for you to see how far I would go for you, how much for Alana to study,” and he says her name like it’s gone moldy, “to gather data to publish ...posthumously about me?” He spits the words out, poisonous with the unspoken assumption his was not to be a long and happy life in Wolf Trap; that he would die sooner rather than later, and soon enough for Alana to publish before she retired.

“Forgive me if I embrace it. But Jack. We’ve left you in peace, just as much. If you say there’s a war starting...” Will trails off, and the sheer power of the waves of brutality pulsating off the couple in front of Jack overwhelms him. He fights the animal urge to stay very still, hoping the danger passes him by. He catches his breath.

“So where do we stand?” Jack’s voice is still steady, to his relief.

“Dear Will and I will live in peace and enjoy ourselves to the fullest in every sense. When Alana comes to the forefront of our attention again, whether it be years or months, we will kill her and all of us will have our war,” Hannibal says serenely, betraying only a hint of eager covetousness as he describes the coming bloodbath. Will looks at him as if Hannibal has hung the sun, the moon, and all its stars, and Jack can’t look at Will any longer.

“You’d let Margot be a widow and her son an orphan, Will? Strip her family away? What about the Lost Boys?” Jack asks, staring at the ground to the side of the table.

Will doesn’t let Jack escape his gaze, pinning him.

“Considering Alana was dead before she met them, it’s been a gift to have them as long as she has, hasn’t it?” Will is growing bored, now, and the dark malice surrounding Jack, threatening to drown him, prickles as if they’re considering starting the war now.

“One last chance, Will,” he says, the words rejected and dead before they have left his mouth. There has never been any chance since they went over the cliff. Perhaps long before. This couple in front of him are bound impenetrably, willingly, to each other, so tightly and so fully that even as they sit distinct and whole, they blur as if a double vision before him. Jack never had a chance. The snare has closed.

“Goodbye, Jack,” Will says, putting an end to the conversation.

“Give our best to Margot,” Hannibal says, and it’s lyrical, practically joyous. He rises in synchronous, leonine grace with Will. Will rests a hand on Hannibal’s arm. They share a look so overwhelming that it makes Jack’s stomach roil in unwanted, peripheral arousal. Neither spares a glance back as they pass him, walking hand-in-hand down the sun-drenched piazza.


End file.
